


Two Halves Makes a Hole

by Masu_Trout



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series), Silent Hill 4: The Room
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-26 13:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5005774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry doesn't want to leave South Ashfield Heights. Eileen's not certain she can bear to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Halves Makes a Hole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uumuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/gifts).



“Henry,” Eileen said, “there was a dead body in there. A _rotting_ one.”

“Yeah.” Henry nodded. If he noticed the exasperation in her voice, he gave absolutely no sign. “That's why I bought the industrial-strength bleach.”

Eileen sighed. From her vantage point, seated on the rim of Henry's bathtub, she could only see about half of what was going on. She didn't really _need_ sight, though—the harsh acidic smell of chemicals permeated the hall, undercut by the less obvious but even more revolting stench of decay. 

Henry was up to his elbows in cleaning gloves that looked more like gauntlets, and his eyes were almost completely covered by a pair of oversized safety goggles. He'd offered her a set as well, but she'd opted to stay back instead.

Really, it shouldn't have surprised Eileen that Henry was the sort of man to take the labels of cleaning products very seriously.

“The bleach really isn't the part of this I'm confused about. Are you seriously planning to stay here?”

“Yeah, I am. You're staying in your apartment too, aren't you?”

“Not because I want to! It's just that 'magically-induced trauma' isn't exactly something I can get insurance to cover. I'd bet you have a whole lot more options than me—doesn't it freak you out, living here?”

Eileen couldn't stop remembering the monsters they'd seen, the twisted and impossible places they'd walked through. She dreamed of Cynthia and Richard and Jasper and of her own massive and expressionless face staring down at her. More nights than not, she woke up clutching at the scars still half-carved into her back.

(The doctors said they'd fade, but the things she knew of Walter suggested otherwise.)

It was bad enough for her, and she hadn't even lived in the source of it all; she hadn't been trapped for nearly so long as Henry. How he could bear to spend even a second longer inside Room 302, she couldn't even begin to imagine.

Henry paused for a moment in his work, hanging the scrub brush on the end of his bucket. He tilted his head to the side as he thought.

That was the thing about Henry—he never seemed to have particularly strong opinions on anything. Before they'd become Walter's targets, Eileen had assumed he was just a really dispassionate guy. But it wasn't so much that he didn't care; he simply conserved his caring, storing it and bottling it up until he found something he _really_ felt strongly about.

There were things Henry simply wouldn't budge on. Room 302 was apparently one of them.

“It's not like it doesn't scare me,” he said finally. “I think a lot about everyone who didn't make it out.”

Eileen made a noise of sympathy. Nineteen people killed, and she and Henry were the only two to survive—it wasn't quite lottery ticket odds, but still luckier than she'd ever expected to be in her life. If Henry hadn't been there...

She brushed her fingers against the pitted scars that dotted her forearms. If Hnery hadn't been there, she'd have been torn to bits by a monster or shredded in the jaws of that massive machine.

“It's just that I don't think I'd be any less afraid if I moved away. When I'm here, I can check and make sure I'm the only thing in my apartment. If I left...” The corners of Henry's mouth curled into a grin. “Well, I don't think whoever moved here would be happy with me showing up in the middle of the night.”

Eileen couldn't help but laugh. “Oh God, can you imagine? 'Excuse me, sir, don't mean to be a bother, I just want to make sure there aren't any strange holes in your bathroom. Mind if I come in?'”

“Exactly.” Henry chuckled, leaning back against the wall. “This place will keep existing, whether I live in it or not.”

Without Walter's influence, the secret room had shrunk—it looked like a normal piece of the apartment now, instead of the cavernous thing it had grown into under his power. Still, she could see traces of his influences in it even now: faded red stains marked the floor and the walls were gouged with jagged tears. The sight in her right eye hadn't quite recovered yet; it lent her world a strange, hazy aura. If she closed her good eye and looked around her, she could almost imagine she was in that dark place still.

“I guess I can understand that,” she said. “I keep thinking about how much I want to get away from this place, but when it comes down to it I'm not sure where I'd go.”

Henry shrugged. “If you don't want to stay, you shouldn't.”

Eileen tried to imagine leaving South Ashfield Heights and renting a new apartment in a new part of town. She could find a complex where the appliances were all new, no murders had ever been committed only doors away from her, and where none of her neighbors would so much as think of keeping an umbilical cord in a box. 

And then what? 

Would she really feel safe there, knowing what had happened on the other side of town? She couldn't imagine sleeping any more comfortably just because she was fifteen minutes away from where it had all happened. But how far would she have to run, then? A new city, a new state, a new country... she wasn't sure anywhere would be far enough. No matter where she was, she'd be just a hole away from stepping back into that nightmare.

“I think I'd feel guilty,” Eileen confessed, “if I ran off somewhere and left my place to someone who had no idea what happened there.”

“It's not like you or I had any clue either.”

“Exactly! I mean, what the hell? Shouldn't we have been warned about that?”

He frowned. “I did wonder why the rooms were so cheap.” 

“I just assumed it was because of the décor.” 

“Well,” Henry said, picking his brush back up, “I guess that's the lesson to take from this.”

“What, don't trust apartments with ugly color schemes?” If it were possible, this place was even worse-looking than hers; she didn't know whether to blame Henry or Joseph for that one.

“If something seems too good to be true, run like hell.” 

Eileen laughed. “I'll keep that in mind.”

She watched as he turned his attention back to the secret room's walls, scrubbing at every dark spot with a single-minded devotion. She admired Henry more than she was willing to admit. He seemed so straightforward, so sure of himself. She didn't remember all of their time spent together in the other world—the further along they went, the blurrier her thoughts had gotten—but she remembered how calm he'd been. Nothing phased him; he'd split a dog monster neck-to-groin like it was effortless, shrugged off the ghosts' presence without so much as comment.

He had to be afraid of something, but Eileen couldn't have guessed what it was. Hell, she barely knew Henry's last name. She had no idea how old he was, where he worked, or even what sort of music he liked. Before this month, he'd been nothing more than her sweet-but-weird neighbor, a guy who never seemed to get out much and wore the same style of rumpled button-down just about every single day. There were two different Henrys coexisting in her memories, and she didn't know how to fit them together.

Eileen made a decision.

“Hey, Henry. Come get coffee with me tonight.”

“Huh?” He looked at her, confusion written across his face.

“My shift tonight ends at ten, and these days I hate walking home alone. Stop by around then—I'll even pay for your drink if you do.” She grinned at him, giving her very best customer service look.

Henry smiled back at her. It was a strangely endearing expression, almost sleepy and yet surprisingly open. 

“Sure,” he said. “I'll do that.”


End file.
